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Tue, 26 Sep 2017 22:24:54 +0200MYOBen-gbAmazon about to release a set of glasseshttp://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/44546-amazon-about-to-release-a-set-of-glasses
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/wearables/44546-amazon-about-to-release-a-set-of-glasses

Alexa on board

The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn that Amazon is about to release a set of smart glasses.

The device, designed like a regular pair of spectacles, will allow Amazon's digital assistant Alexa to be summoned anytime at all places.

There would be a bone-conduction audio system in the device to allow the wearer to hear Alexa without inserting headphones into his or her ears, according to the report.

Earlier this year, Alphabet Inc re-introduced its own wearable glass headset, Google Glass, after discontinuing its production last year. However we are yet to see anything appear on the marketplace outside the Google glass developer product.

France, Germany, Italy and Spain are expected to get tough with big US tech by demanding that they be taxed in Europe based on their revenues, rather than only profits.

France is leading a push to clamp down on the taxation of such companies, but has found support from other countries also frustrated at the low tax they receive.

Currently such companies are often taxed on profits booked by subsidiaries in low-tax countries like Ireland, even though the revenue originated from other EU countries.

“We should no longer accept that these companies do business in Europe while paying minimal amounts of tax to our treasuries”, the four ministers wrote.

The letter, signed by French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, Wolfgang Schaeuble of Germany, Pier-Carlo Padoan of Italy and Luis de Guindos, was addressed to the EU’s Estonian presidency with the bloc’s executive Commission in copy.

They urged the Commission to come up with a solution creating an “equalisation tax” on turnover that would bring taxation to the level of corporate tax in the country where the revenue was earned.

“The amounts raised would aim to reflect some of what these companies should be paying in terms of corporate tax,” the ministers said in the letter, first reported on by the Financial Times.

Le Maire, Schaeuble, Padoan and de Guindos of Spain said they wanted to present the issue to other EU counterparts at a Sept. 15-16 meeting in Tallinn.

The EU’s current Estonian presidency has scheduled a discussion at the meeting about the concept of “permanent establishment”, with the aim of making it possible to tax firms where they create value, not only where they have their tax residence.

France has stepped up pressure for EU tax rules after facing legal setbacks trying to obtain payments for taxes on activities in the country.

A French court ruled in July French court ruled that Google was not liable to pay 1.1 billion euros in back taxes because it had no “permanent establishment” in France and ran its operations there from Ireland.

Just to prove you have absolutely nothing to worry about from AI, an outfit called Netscribes has worked out that the entire market is sewn up by big US corporations.

Netscribes had a look at who owns the patents for AI development and found that Amazon, eBay, IBM, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have consolidated their dominance in this space during the last five years.

In their report with the catchy title Artificial Intelligence in Retail: Patent Analysis, more than 1200 patent publications have been filed globally since 2012, with a focus on artificial intelligence in the retail and e-commerce segment.

Some of the key application areas that Amazon is focused on include customer surveillance and recommendation systems for offline retailers. eBay's focus is around the areas of machine learning algorithms, data processing techniques, and neural networks, that seem to be geared towards tackling the challenges in online resource management, prediction of online shopper behavior, and inventory management.

Lalatendu Sahoo, Head of Patent Research at Netscribes said: "Firms such as Amazon and Google are constantly raising the stakes through technology and innovation and are making it difficult for new entrants to survive in this explosive growth market.

“It's crucial to know the technology developments happening in your industry in order to adapt accordingly."

He added: "Through a patent analysis, brands and retailers can gain the intelligence needed to survive long term in the changing business environment. The key is to be on a constant lookout for futuristic technologies that can potentially disrupt your existing business model."

It would make an interesting dystopian movie where the big corporations use their AI technology to take over the world. Although it is also possible that this has already happened.

Amazon and Microsoft are partnering to integrate their Alexa and Cortana digital assistants.

The cunning plan is that Alexa users will be able to access Cortana, and vice versa across a range of devices.

According to the New York Times, which has problems with the fact that there are better digital assistants other than Siri, someone using an Alexa device will have to say “Alexa, open Cortana” to get talking.

Microsoft’s digital assistant, and someone using Cortana will have to say “Cortana, open Alexa” to talk to Amazon’s.

It appears that both companies have simply created skills on each others platforms to enable the basic integration.

This cross-platform integration will also allow Alexa users to access some of the more unique aspects of Cortana.

For example, Cortana is built directly into its Office products, and now Alexa will get that functionality via Cortana. So she can access work calendars and email. Cortana users will be able to call up Alexa to get access to the ones that Cortana is missing. This might mean controlling smart home devices, or shopping on Amazon.

Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have all built rival digital assistants that have been seen as walled gardens blocked off from each other, and this partnership signals Vole and Amazon will be working together.

The updated Cortana and Alexa assistants will be available some time “later this year”. Windows 10 users will be able to access Alexa via Cortana on their PCs, followed by Android and iOS “in the future”.

Google is cutting the price for high speed storage attached to its cloud virtual machines.

Punters will pay up to 63 percent less for Local SSD storage that’s attached to the virtual machines they use in Google Cloud Platform.

Local SSD storage is designed to offer companies high-speed data access for cloud applications that require it for high performance like data analysis and other tasks. Google’s storage will last for as long as the underlying instance keeps running in the company’s cloud.

Google offers the ability to store arbitrary amounts of data in a Local SSD blob, rather than lock certain instance types to certain amounts of storage. Customers are charged for how much data they store each month. In the US. customers, Google will charge eight cents per GB stored per month under the new pricing scheme. We have not heard what the Euro price will be yet.

These price cuts also benefit users of GCP’s Preemptible virtual machines that can run for a maximum of 24 hours and can be shut down by the tech giant at any time if it needs the compute capacity for other workloads. In exchange for those drawbacks, customers using Preemptible VMs will be able to get the same compute power for a lower price.

All this shows how cut throat cloudy competition is getting with Google, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure all slashing their prices to stay ahead.

Amazon is allowing Blu to flog its phones on the site after the budget phone maker BLU convinced the outfit that it was not sending data to China.

AdUps, the Chinese company that provides affordable firmware update software to countless budget Android phones, is not spyware.

To be fair, Kryptowire, the security firm that broke the news last year, did not call it that.

In its 2016 report, it simply described AdUps' OTA software as "FIRMWARE THAT TRANSMITTED PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION (PII) WITHOUT USER CONSENT OR DISCLOSURE".

While that was the FTC definition of spyware, this year it dropped the second part of that phrase and simply reported on "mobile devices for Personally Identifiable Information (PII) collection and transmission to third parties".

BLU claims it is doing nothing that violates its Privacy Policy and, therefore, doesn't constitute any wrongdoing. When you agreed to use BLU's devices, you basically agreed that such data could possibly be transmitted to a third party outside the US.

BLU's second arguments was that everybody else is doing it.

The data that AdUps collects is the same or even just a fraction of what other OEMs are collecting. Google is hardly the bastion of privacy and other OEMs are also collecting such data and sending it to servers in China, as is the case with Huawei and ZTE.

BLU added that Kryptowire's new report really only identifies the Cubot X16S, from a Chinese OEM, as the only smartphone really spying on its users.

It looks like Amazon agreed because BLU phones are now on sale at the site.

Amazon has suspended sales of the ultra cheap Blu phones after a potential security issue appears to have gone on for a little too long .

Amazon said it was suspending sales of phones from Blu after security firm Kryptowire demonstrated last week how software in Blu's phones collected data and sent it to servers in China without alerting people.

Rather than do anything about it, Blu defended its software, created by a Chinese company called Shanghai Adups Technology, and denied any wrongdoing.

A company spokeswoman said at the time it "has several policies in place which take customer privacy and security seriously". But added there had been no breaches.

Blu said it was in a process of review to reinstate the phones at Amazon. This might be a little hard if it does not think there is anything wrong with a phone collecting data and sending it to China. Still, hope blooms eternal.

Sir William Gates the III is no longer the world’s richest man, having spent too much helping to save humanity.

Stepping in to fill the void is the the pink Mekon Jeff Bezos, who thanks to a surge in the value of Amazon.com has became the world’s richest bloke.

Shares of the online retailer fell 0.7 percent to $1,046 at 4 p.m. in New York, after climbing as high as $1,083.31 four hours earlier, which gave Bezos a net worth of $92.3 billion. Gates had a net worth of $90.8 billion.

Bezos remains ranked second on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, behind Microsoft's Gates, 61, who has held the top spot since May 2013.

Gates has been spending his fortune trying to work out how to wipe out the mosquito and cure all sorts of nasty African illnesses. Bezos spends his money on property and putting rich people into space.

For example, he owns a top-of-the-line, $65 million private jet, the 2015 Gulfstream G-650ER, via his holding company, Poplar Glen, says Wealth-X. The model is the "longest range business jet" and has a top speed of Mach .925, according to the Robb Report.

Inside a mountain on Bezos's property in Texas, workers are constructing one of several 10,000-year clocks. The clock, which is meant to run for 10,000 years, is the brainchild of The Long Now foundation, and Bezos has invested a reported $42 million into the project.

To be fair Bezos has allocated some of his wealth to charitable causes. In May, Bezos gave $1 million to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

In in 2015 the Bezos Family Foundation had more than $54 million in assets and donated more than $20 million. Recipients include Teach for America, the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy, the Long

Now Foundation, Aspen University and Woodland Park Zoological Society. Bezos also donated $2.7 million to the University of Washington Foundation (2013), $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage (2012) and $15 million to Princeton University.

A group that represents industry giants has sided with Apple fighting a legal case Qualcomm has made has sent the US International Trade Commission (ITC) comments that take the side of the fruity cargo cult.

The group, called the Computer & Communications Industry Association, thinks that Qualcomm’s call to ban Apple from importing telephones made outside of the USA would harm Americans. That's what Donald Trump thinks too, sometimes.

The association has as some of its members, corporate giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft, Intel and Samsung, according to Reuters.

The association apparently believes that Qualcomm is monopolistic and it claims its comments are made on the behalf of ordinary people that buy telephones.

Qualcomm is locked in legal battles with Apple in a standoff that’s probably costing both of them a not so pretty penny.

For those of you who have been waiting to bring an NVIDIA-powered product into yet another room in your house, today is the day Amazon has Tegra K1-powered smart oven on sale.

The June oven, a NVIDIA Tegra K1 powered, kitchen appliance is on sale today for PRIME Day at Amazon for $999.

The June oven has a sleek industrial design that features a full-width oven window with an integrated touchscreen to maximize internal cooking space. The 5-inch display gives you control with its intuitive user interface. On the inside, however, is where the magic happens. Using dual-surround convection technology and instant-on carbon fiber heating elements, the June Oven allows for perfection in cooking your favorite foods. Although it is built for the countertop, the oven can fit a whole chicken, up to nine pieces of bread, a quarter-size baking sheet and even a 12-pound turkey. There is also built-in intelligent support for other foods including steaks and chicken, cookies and cakes, toast and roasts, even lobster.

The oven includes a high-definition camera that is able to identify food. The intelligence of the device can even “see” if bagel halves are facing up or down to ensure a crunchier top face and softer exterior. A scale built into the top of the oven weighs the food to help determine cooking times. Also included are probes which allow the device to determine core temperature of whatever is being cooked.